12 ms·

GitHub lock-in?

138 points by g1n016399 11y ago

sytse 11y ago
"A competitor willing to make it easy for GitHub project maintainers to migrate to their services could actually make use of GitHub APIs and provide an automated migration system." This is what we did at GitLab, you can import multiple projects with repos, wikis, issues and pull requests in one go.
- equalarrow 11y ago
  Yup, thank you. :) I like Github, but I've had Gitlab repos for a few years because they allow me to keep some projects "off the books" without having to pay. So, thank you again for this. I've also used your CI, which is great. I've recommended it to a few clients, so thank you again! You guys have done a great job for the community and I wish you all the best!
  - sytse 11y ago
    Great to hear that equalarrow, thanks for recommending GitLab and have a great weekend!
- chias 11y ago
  Oh wow, I had no idea there was a "github with free private repos". Just signed up, can't wait to push a few projects. Thank you!
  - sytse 11y ago
    You're welcome, thanks for signing up.
typeformer 11y ago
There is absolutely no denying that GitHub has done a lot of good for the world, but at the same time I feel that because of their true open source foundation GitLab really listens to their community much better. On a related note, many devs are just now discovering that with GitLab you can have unlimited private or public repos hosted at GitLab.com for free. Already a number of prominent projects have made the jump for this reason alone. You can find the nascent but growing list of publicly listed projects here: https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore In the end, strong competition is good for users and projects and the Git ecosystem will only continue to grow and benefit from it; may the friendly rivalry continue.
- dominotw 11y ago
  Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github". Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader, gitlab can make no such claim. Gitlab is a slow and clunky github clone at best. Give me a strong reason to switch by doing something cool gitlab. Please have at-least one killer original feature that shows that you are capable of original thinking . Merely existing and throwing some free stuff at me is not a good reason for me to switch.
  - oxide 11y ago
    >Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github". it sounds like some people are looking for just that, though.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - s986s 11y ago
    Do you want to live in a centralized world or one with competition? How do you support that? I personally want to live in competition. I support that through allowing my appetites to lead me when making arbitrary choices rather than ceremonious dedication. as a consumer, I want to feel important. I havent switched but gitlab is making me feel that way. Github makes me feel like I have no choice and Im stupid not to. What seems like the better relationship?
    - brbsix 11y ago
      I wholeheartedly agree with you. A world of centralized monopolies is quite a scary prospect. Less so when they are not enforced by government, but concerning nonetheless. However not everyone in tech feels this way. I detect this sentiment in the parent. See: Peter Thiel's thoughts on competition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLWyP83iU5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLWyP83iU5M http://www.bnjs.co/notes/cs183b-lecture-5-peter-thiel-business-strategy-and-monopoly-theory/ http://www.bnjs.co/notes/cs183b-lecture-5-peter-thiel-busine...
ossreality 11y ago
Um, that's not what "open core" usually means. This feels nearly as cringey as the "Dear Dear GitHub" letter that kissed GH's rear real hard. Shout-out to the commentor repping 'gogs'. It's no GitLab (yet) but it's much faster and easier to run.
cburgmer 11y ago
"github-backup [...] backs up everything GitHub publishes about the repository, including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis, milestones, pull requests, watchers, and stars." https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup
- ludamad 11y ago
  Cool. Along with those looking to migrate, it's good for the good ol' paranoid people.
- fapjacks 11y ago
  Perfect! I have been searching fruitlessly for exactly this since GitHub changed and went insane.
- david-given 11y ago
  Can you put the data back again, though? Last I saw it wasn't possible to use the API to, e.g., add issues owned by someone else. (I was wanting to migrate mailing list archives off SourceForge.)
taspeotis 11y ago
I've started hosting some really small projects with Microsoft's Visual Studio Online ("Team Services" now). It's surprising what you get for free. https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-services-pricing-vs https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-serv... Work's blessed me with an MSDN Enterprise subscription, so I get some extra bells and whistles. Discounting the extras, it's a hosted version of TFS for free (for five developers + unlimited "stakeholders"). Which is great if you have bug bears about GitHub's issue tracking. https://www.visualstudio.com/features/agiletools-vs https://www.visualstudio.com/features/agiletools-vs It's not going to replace GitHub for me, yet. I think Microsoft said it themselves when they started hosting projects on GitHub instead of Codeplex: "GitHub is where the community is." EDIT: I should say, VSO/VSTS is really focused towards .NET development. It has some special Java support, too, and beyond that it's general purpose enough to work with other languages.
- sandGorgon 11y ago
  This is do awesome. 3$ per developer per month and the Ui looks great! One place where people screw up in git hosting is the issues or navigation. I can't wait to try this out. The community features of github are unimportant for a private repo.
rogerthatt 11y ago
Happy to be locked in to github. There is a tipping point where value gained exceeds the risk of vendor lockin, and in my case there is no question the benefits outweight the risk.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rogerthatt 11y ago
  Why would this comment be getting downvoted so many times?? If you dont agree comment. HN users can be so passive agressive sometimes
  - J_Darnley 11y ago
    Because you sound like a shill. I'll disagree and comment. Github has many reasons to not like or even to use it. It is centralised. It is proprietary. It is a bad company. Other services get built around it and it alone. It is becoming a One True Login.
  - softinio 11y ago
    I agree with you. Unbelievable. I upvoted you btw :-) Quality of readers of HN and reddit getting lower all the time. Look forward to being downvoted for ageeing with you :-)
gonyea 11y ago
"Vendor Lock-in" is a meaningless phrase if you start applying it to GitHub. You're talking about competition. GitHub competes and people like it a lot. That's not a lock-in. Your business won't end if you switch to bitbucket. A developer might grump at you for a day. Big deal. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. They're the ones with a lock-in. They could go into a corporate coma and money would still print itself and climb into their pockets for the next 20-years.
Animats 11y ago
From the article: "I wrote "your data is accessible", but actually I should rather write "your data is currently accessible". Theoretically, nothing prevents GitHub from removing programmatic access to parts of the data they host." Do their terms of service permit them to do that? Unfortunately, yes: "GitHub reserves the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, your access to the API (or any part thereof) with or without notice. ... GitHub, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service, or any other GitHub service, for any reason at any time. Such termination of the Service will result in the deactivation or deletion of your Account or your access to your Account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all Content in your Account. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. In the event that GitHub takes action to suspend or terminate an account, we will make a reasonable effort to provide the affected account owner with a copy of their account contents upon request, unless the account was suspended or terminated due to unlawful conduct." That's a problem. A management change at Github could have a big effect on open source software. This isn't a theoretical issue; Google Code was shut down, and Sourceforge turned to the dark side and started bundling adware with downloads. It would be useful if a nonprofit such as the Internet Archive or the Wikimedia Foundation mirrored Github periodically. Just in case Github management got uppity.
jacquesm 11y ago
One thing I'm missing in the whole gitlab/github hosted discussion is how big is the chance that gitlab will fail where github will succeed because github actually has a lot more income because they charge for the private repos? In the longer term this may be a deciding factor, but if enough people that right now pay for github move to gitlab the balance will shift to the point where gitlab won't be able to deal with the amount of free users and gitlab will fail because they no longer have enough paying users... It's hard to compete with free, but it is also hard to sustain free.
- manquer 11y ago
  As many open source projects have demonstrated, even if the company backing the project fails, if the community is strong, the project will continue to evolve. Same can not be said for Github. Gitlab while does provide free sass services, their servers are notorious in terms of reliability. Many Gitlab users like it because we want to host the application ourselves. There was always bitbucket for free private repos. People are not moving because it is free, they move because they have great control over their code base.
  - sytse 11y ago
    I wanted to add that we're working hard to improve .com reliability in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues
- sytse 11y ago
  For more about our thoughts to sustain free please see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-free-forever https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-...
precedent123 11y ago
Lock-in or not, it's hard to see what is compelling about GitHub in the first place. I agree with Torvalds that pull request are a horrible and bureaucratic way of submitting patches. Possibly that is what people like about GitHub: Leave an audit trail of your activities, do a lot of doc fixes to have better statistics... Perhaps the following quote of pg also applies to GitHub: "Object-oriented programming generates a lot of what looks like work. Back in the days of fanfold, there was a type of programmer who would only put five or ten lines of code on a page, preceded by twenty lines of elaborately formatted comments. Object-oriented programming is like crack for these people: it lets you incorporate all this scaffolding right into your source code. Something that a Lisp hacker might handle by pushing a symbol onto a list becomes a whole file of classes and methods. So it is a good tool if you want to convince yourself, or someone else, that you are doing a lot of work."
gspetr 11y ago
> GitHub is, in my opinion, an "ethical" proprietary software company, if such thing can exist If that were true, they would not have embarked upon a Thought Police crusade like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 "Github threatens to shut down a repository for using the word 'retard'"
- k__ 11y ago
  Maybe the use of such words increases toxicity by 250%?
  - stonogo 11y ago
    You're not doing anyone any favors by assuming 'toxicity' is a measurable quantity or that you've sufficiently developed a Theory of Toxicity such that you can ascribe relative values to specific words.
    - k__ 11y ago
      Oh no, I didn't developed this "Theory of Toxicity", Riot Games did.
  - awqrre 11y ago
    Do you really think it affects Github as a hole and not just a single repo?
- morgante 11y ago
  The fact that they bother to go on crusades like that affirms to me that GitHub is indeed operating according to an "ethical" framework—just not one I share.
andrewchambers 11y ago
http://phabricator.org/ http://phabricator.org/ seems really good.
- k__ 11y ago
  Is there a Phabricator vs GitLab shoot-out anywhere? The GitLab people are always posting here, so it seems the stuff you can read here about it is rather biased.
  - djtide 11y ago
    Hard to say since every tool out there moves very fast and we're just building what we think our users want. Overall my personal opinion is the "pull request" model is flawed for businesses but great for open source. Phabricator doesn't serve two masters in that regard. This means we focus more on developer efficiency and code quality. Tools like arcanist are harder to convince people to adopt, but save me personally a few hours each week. (Arcanist does pre-commit lint, unit, and patch emitting). Other tools like Herald (business actions!) and Owners (claim you own code!) are also highly useful at scale. Our lead dev posted some explanations on how we're different than other popular choices: https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/766/write_review_merge_publish_phabricator_review_workflow/ https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/766/write_rev... David Cramer also publish some thoughts on the pull request model: http://cramer.io/2014/05/03/on-pull-requests http://cramer.io/2014/05/03/on-pull-requests
- rolfvandekrol 11y ago
  I don't know. The homepage of Phabricator doesn't give me the impression the developers take the task of building a corporate collaboration tool very seriously.
  - sangnoir 11y ago
    Sounds like you might prefer the Serious Business Edition(TM) [1] of Phabricator. I don't fault them for having a little fun/being irreverent (or as they call it:'flavor'), but it's a config setting you can toggle on your deployment, seriously [1] 1. https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone/#removing-flavor https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone...
junto 11y ago
I'm really surprised that Github hasn't done what Stackoverflow does, and advertise jobs. They have an awesome knowledge of the skills of their users up front.
- phpnode 11y ago
  Github jobs has existed for years and years but I agree that they are massively under-utilising their data. https://jobs.github.com/ https://jobs.github.com/
ThePhysicist 11y ago
With the risk of sounding overly critical, I really can't understand why people get so emotional about software. Github isn't a public utility company and so isn't obliged to provide free services to anyone or cater specifically to the needs of one group of users, if they do so it is by their own choice and because it helps them to fulfill their monetary goals (making money is the main purpose of a for-profit company). Also, I can't see any significant lock-in effects at work here. Personally, I have several dozens software projects: Some of them are on Github, some on Bitbucket, some run on a custom Gitlab instance and some are plain git repositories on some Linux server. I think we have more choices for hosting code projects today than we had ever before, it's just that like in many other markets there is a power law at work which makes that one player has 90 % market share, this doesn't automatically mean that the largest player has a monopoly on source code hosting though. As the author says, the fact that the software Github provides is affordable, convenient and works very well is probably the only lock-in there is, and this kind of quality-based lock-in is actually desirable in my opinion. What would not be acceptable to me is a lock-in based on the fact that your data is stored somewhere from where it's very hard/impossible to get out (SAP comes to mind), this isn't the case for Github though.
kh_hk 11y ago
Most articles bashing/unbashing github always forget what to me is the real point. The problem is not in the git part of GitHub. GitHub is a social network: star, fork, comment, popularity. The fact that some devs would see github as the only place to be to get to make their contributions "public" it is acting more as a social network and less about a git hosting tool. That's the real lock-in. That's also GitHub's value. It is the largest social network of developers.
softinio 11y ago
I wish these anti-github blogs and fud would stop and people found better things to write about. Github is fantastic.I love using it over anyone else. GitLab and Bitbucket are good too. You can even host stuff yourself. Its nice to have choice. Choose the one your like.I Choose github and that is my choice.

138 points by g1n016399 11y ago

sytse 11y ago

"A competitor willing to make it easy for GitHub project maintainers to migrate to their services could actually make use of GitHub APIs and provide an automated migration system." This is what we did at GitLab, you can import multiple projects with repos, wikis, issues and pull requests in one go.

equalarrow 11y ago
Yup, thank you. :) I like Github, but I've had Gitlab repos for a few years because they allow me to keep some projects "off the books" without having to pay. So, thank you again for this. I've also used your CI, which is great. I've recommended it to a few clients, so thank you again! You guys have done a great job for the community and I wish you all the best!
- sytse 11y ago
  Great to hear that equalarrow, thanks for recommending GitLab and have a great weekend!
chias 11y ago
Oh wow, I had no idea there was a "github with free private repos". Just signed up, can't wait to push a few projects. Thank you!
- sytse 11y ago
  You're welcome, thanks for signing up.

typeformer 11y ago

There is absolutely no denying that GitHub has done a lot of good for the world, but at the same time I feel that because of their true open source foundation GitLab really listens to their community much better. On a related note, many devs are just now discovering that with GitLab you can have unlimited private or public repos hosted at GitLab.com for free. Already a number of prominent projects have made the jump for this reason alone. You can find the nascent but growing list of publicly listed projects here: https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore In the end, strong competition is good for users and projects and the Git ecosystem will only continue to grow and benefit from it; may the friendly rivalry continue.

dominotw 11y ago
Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github". Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader, gitlab can make no such claim. Gitlab is a slow and clunky github clone at best. Give me a strong reason to switch by doing something cool gitlab. Please have at-least one killer original feature that shows that you are capable of original thinking . Merely existing and throwing some free stuff at me is not a good reason for me to switch.
- oxide 11y ago
  >Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github". it sounds like some people are looking for just that, though.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- s986s 11y ago
  Do you want to live in a centralized world or one with competition? How do you support that? I personally want to live in competition. I support that through allowing my appetites to lead me when making arbitrary choices rather than ceremonious dedication. as a consumer, I want to feel important. I havent switched but gitlab is making me feel that way. Github makes me feel like I have no choice and Im stupid not to. What seems like the better relationship?
  - brbsix 11y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree with you. A world of centralized monopolies is quite a scary prospect. Less so when they are not enforced by government, but concerning nonetheless. However not everyone in tech feels this way. I detect this sentiment in the parent. See: Peter Thiel's thoughts on competition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLWyP83iU5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLWyP83iU5M http://www.bnjs.co/notes/cs183b-lecture-5-peter-thiel-business-strategy-and-monopoly-theory/ http://www.bnjs.co/notes/cs183b-lecture-5-peter-thiel-busine...

ossreality 11y ago

Um, that's not what "open core" usually means. This feels nearly as cringey as the "Dear Dear GitHub" letter that kissed GH's rear real hard. Shout-out to the commentor repping 'gogs'. It's no GitLab (yet) but it's much faster and easier to run.

cburgmer 11y ago

"github-backup [...] backs up everything GitHub publishes about the repository, including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis, milestones, pull requests, watchers, and stars." https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup

ludamad 11y ago
Cool. Along with those looking to migrate, it's good for the good ol' paranoid people.
fapjacks 11y ago
Perfect! I have been searching fruitlessly for exactly this since GitHub changed and went insane.
david-given 11y ago
Can you put the data back again, though? Last I saw it wasn't possible to use the API to, e.g., add issues owned by someone else. (I was wanting to migrate mailing list archives off SourceForge.)

taspeotis 11y ago

I've started hosting some really small projects with Microsoft's Visual Studio Online ("Team Services" now). It's surprising what you get for free. https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-services-pricing-vs https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-serv... Work's blessed me with an MSDN Enterprise subscription, so I get some extra bells and whistles. Discounting the extras, it's a hosted version of TFS for free (for five developers + unlimited "stakeholders"). Which is great if you have bug bears about GitHub's issue tracking. https://www.visualstudio.com/features/agiletools-vs https://www.visualstudio.com/features/agiletools-vs It's not going to replace GitHub for me, yet. I think Microsoft said it themselves when they started hosting projects on GitHub instead of Codeplex: "GitHub is where the community is." EDIT: I should say, VSO/VSTS is really focused towards .NET development. It has some special Java support, too, and beyond that it's general purpose enough to work with other languages.

sandGorgon 11y ago
This is do awesome. 3$ per developer per month and the Ui looks great! One place where people screw up in git hosting is the issues or navigation. I can't wait to try this out. The community features of github are unimportant for a private repo.

rogerthatt 11y ago

Happy to be locked in to github. There is a tipping point where value gained exceeds the risk of vendor lockin, and in my case there is no question the benefits outweight the risk.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rogerthatt 11y ago
Why would this comment be getting downvoted so many times?? If you dont agree comment. HN users can be so passive agressive sometimes
- J_Darnley 11y ago
  Because you sound like a shill. I'll disagree and comment. Github has many reasons to not like or even to use it. It is centralised. It is proprietary. It is a bad company. Other services get built around it and it alone. It is becoming a One True Login.
- softinio 11y ago
  I agree with you. Unbelievable. I upvoted you btw :-) Quality of readers of HN and reddit getting lower all the time. Look forward to being downvoted for ageeing with you :-)

gonyea 11y ago

"Vendor Lock-in" is a meaningless phrase if you start applying it to GitHub. You're talking about competition. GitHub competes and people like it a lot. That's not a lock-in. Your business won't end if you switch to bitbucket. A developer might grump at you for a day. Big deal. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. They're the ones with a lock-in. They could go into a corporate coma and money would still print itself and climb into their pockets for the next 20-years.

Animats 11y ago

From the article: "I wrote "your data is accessible", but actually I should rather write "your data is currently accessible". Theoretically, nothing prevents GitHub from removing programmatic access to parts of the data they host." Do their terms of service permit them to do that? Unfortunately, yes: "GitHub reserves the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, your access to the API (or any part thereof) with or without notice. ... GitHub, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service, or any other GitHub service, for any reason at any time. Such termination of the Service will result in the deactivation or deletion of your Account or your access to your Account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all Content in your Account. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. In the event that GitHub takes action to suspend or terminate an account, we will make a reasonable effort to provide the affected account owner with a copy of their account contents upon request, unless the account was suspended or terminated due to unlawful conduct." That's a problem. A management change at Github could have a big effect on open source software. This isn't a theoretical issue; Google Code was shut down, and Sourceforge turned to the dark side and started bundling adware with downloads. It would be useful if a nonprofit such as the Internet Archive or the Wikimedia Foundation mirrored Github periodically. Just in case Github management got uppity.

jacquesm 11y ago

One thing I'm missing in the whole gitlab/github hosted discussion is how big is the chance that gitlab will fail where github will succeed because github actually has a lot more income because they charge for the private repos? In the longer term this may be a deciding factor, but if enough people that right now pay for github move to gitlab the balance will shift to the point where gitlab won't be able to deal with the amount of free users and gitlab will fail because they no longer have enough paying users... It's hard to compete with free, but it is also hard to sustain free.

manquer 11y ago
As many open source projects have demonstrated, even if the company backing the project fails, if the community is strong, the project will continue to evolve. Same can not be said for Github. Gitlab while does provide free sass services, their servers are notorious in terms of reliability. Many Gitlab users like it because we want to host the application ourselves. There was always bitbucket for free private repos. People are not moving because it is free, they move because they have great control over their code base.
- sytse 11y ago
  I wanted to add that we're working hard to improve .com reliability in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues
sytse 11y ago
For more about our thoughts to sustain free please see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-free-forever https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-...

precedent123 11y ago

Lock-in or not, it's hard to see what is compelling about GitHub in the first place. I agree with Torvalds that pull request are a horrible and bureaucratic way of submitting patches. Possibly that is what people like about GitHub: Leave an audit trail of your activities, do a lot of doc fixes to have better statistics... Perhaps the following quote of pg also applies to GitHub: "Object-oriented programming generates a lot of what looks like work. Back in the days of fanfold, there was a type of programmer who would only put five or ten lines of code on a page, preceded by twenty lines of elaborately formatted comments. Object-oriented programming is like crack for these people: it lets you incorporate all this scaffolding right into your source code. Something that a Lisp hacker might handle by pushing a symbol onto a list becomes a whole file of classes and methods. So it is a good tool if you want to convince yourself, or someone else, that you are doing a lot of work."

gspetr 11y ago

> GitHub is, in my opinion, an "ethical" proprietary software company, if such thing can exist If that were true, they would not have embarked upon a Thought Police crusade like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 "Github threatens to shut down a repository for using the word 'retard'"

k__ 11y ago
Maybe the use of such words increases toxicity by 250%?
- stonogo 11y ago
  You're not doing anyone any favors by assuming 'toxicity' is a measurable quantity or that you've sufficiently developed a Theory of Toxicity such that you can ascribe relative values to specific words.
  - k__ 11y ago
    Oh no, I didn't developed this "Theory of Toxicity", Riot Games did.
- awqrre 11y ago
  Do you really think it affects Github as a hole and not just a single repo?
morgante 11y ago
The fact that they bother to go on crusades like that affirms to me that GitHub is indeed operating according to an "ethical" framework—just not one I share.

andrewchambers 11y ago

http://phabricator.org/ http://phabricator.org/ seems really good.

k__ 11y ago
Is there a Phabricator vs GitLab shoot-out anywhere? The GitLab people are always posting here, so it seems the stuff you can read here about it is rather biased.
- djtide 11y ago
  Hard to say since every tool out there moves very fast and we're just building what we think our users want. Overall my personal opinion is the "pull request" model is flawed for businesses but great for open source. Phabricator doesn't serve two masters in that regard. This means we focus more on developer efficiency and code quality. Tools like arcanist are harder to convince people to adopt, but save me personally a few hours each week. (Arcanist does pre-commit lint, unit, and patch emitting). Other tools like Herald (business actions!) and Owners (claim you own code!) are also highly useful at scale. Our lead dev posted some explanations on how we're different than other popular choices: https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/766/write_review_merge_publish_phabricator_review_workflow/ https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/766/write_rev... David Cramer also publish some thoughts on the pull request model: http://cramer.io/2014/05/03/on-pull-requests http://cramer.io/2014/05/03/on-pull-requests
rolfvandekrol 11y ago
I don't know. The homepage of Phabricator doesn't give me the impression the developers take the task of building a corporate collaboration tool very seriously.
- sangnoir 11y ago
  Sounds like you might prefer the Serious Business Edition(TM) [1] of Phabricator. I don't fault them for having a little fun/being irreverent (or as they call it:'flavor'), but it's a config setting you can toggle on your deployment, seriously [1] 1. https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone/#removing-flavor https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone...

junto 11y ago

I'm really surprised that Github hasn't done what Stackoverflow does, and advertise jobs. They have an awesome knowledge of the skills of their users up front.

phpnode 11y ago
Github jobs has existed for years and years but I agree that they are massively under-utilising their data. https://jobs.github.com/ https://jobs.github.com/

ThePhysicist 11y ago

With the risk of sounding overly critical, I really can't understand why people get so emotional about software. Github isn't a public utility company and so isn't obliged to provide free services to anyone or cater specifically to the needs of one group of users, if they do so it is by their own choice and because it helps them to fulfill their monetary goals (making money is the main purpose of a for-profit company). Also, I can't see any significant lock-in effects at work here. Personally, I have several dozens software projects: Some of them are on Github, some on Bitbucket, some run on a custom Gitlab instance and some are plain git repositories on some Linux server. I think we have more choices for hosting code projects today than we had ever before, it's just that like in many other markets there is a power law at work which makes that one player has 90 % market share, this doesn't automatically mean that the largest player has a monopoly on source code hosting though. As the author says, the fact that the software Github provides is affordable, convenient and works very well is probably the only lock-in there is, and this kind of quality-based lock-in is actually desirable in my opinion. What would not be acceptable to me is a lock-in based on the fact that your data is stored somewhere from where it's very hard/impossible to get out (SAP comes to mind), this isn't the case for Github though.

kh_hk 11y ago

Most articles bashing/unbashing github always forget what to me is the real point. The problem is not in the git part of GitHub. GitHub is a social network: star, fork, comment, popularity. The fact that some devs would see github as the only place to be to get to make their contributions "public" it is acting more as a social network and less about a git hosting tool. That's the real lock-in. That's also GitHub's value. It is the largest social network of developers.

softinio 11y ago

I wish these anti-github blogs and fud would stop and people found better things to write about. Github is fantastic.I love using it over anyone else. GitLab and Bitbucket are good too. You can even host stuff yourself. Its nice to have choice. Choose the one your like.I Choose github and that is my choice.